What fires you to get through today's pile of work? Does it intrinsically attract you, tugging your curiosity? Or do you feel a weight of obligation to do as you're supposed to? These two motivation sources, enjoying work versus being driven to work, have been well examined in the workaholism literature, with obligation leading to personal outcomes such as anxiety and rising guilt. However, despite popular accounts such as Daniel Pink's Drive, there is limited research contrasting how these approaches translate to workplace outcomes.

I'm trying to imagine the meeting with American shareholders at which Manchester United's executives explain their choice of successor. "So you got someone lined up?" "Yes, we do, and we're very confident in-" "We heard the Real Madrid guy is...

Great find Ioannis. Where succession is concerned it is also worth noting the importance of longevity, something Sir Alex is certainly known for. It would seem that in the managerial sense Manchester United and Sir Alex sought the development of a new era built on solid foundations rather than a short-lived succession covering a few seasons. David Moyes certainly fits the bill in this regard having managed Everton since 2002. Indeed, he is the third-longest serving manager in the English Premiership behind Ferguson and Wenger.

football (soccer) takes part in sports psychology and i think is a great deal (since it has been played for a long period of time and is played in most of the rest of the world.) the question here was why Moyes over Mourhino? well the answer is easy: its because Mourhino does not have what Moyes do. Moyes pays a great deal of importance to culture, ethics and moral which are inevitably real traits for a long lasting company with great accomplishments.

Personnel selection is changing. Whilst traditional face-to-face interviews are still common, the range of assessment processes that inform the selection of candidates is increasingly diverse, taking advantage not only of new technologies, but also using…

“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”

As Adam Bryant said "There are five hiring attributes we have across the company" and it is true about any job. those attributes are: humility and ownership, expertise, the ability to process on the fly, leadership, and the fundamental attribution error.

“Social network spying on job candidates could reduce the attractiveness of an organization during various phases of the selection process, especially if the applicant pool at large knows or suspects that the organization engages in such screening,” Stoughton notes. “Because internet message boards and social media provide easily accessible forums for job seekers to share their experiences and opinions with others, it is very easy for a soured applicant to affect others’ perceptions of an organization.”

Ioannis Nikolaou's insight:

An excellent article:

Stoughton, J.W. et al (2013). Examining Applicant Reactions to the Use of Social Networking Websites in Pre-Employment Screening, Journal of Business and Psychology. DOI 10.1007/s10869-013-9333-6.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that when job applicants realize an organization has viewed their social media profile, they are less likely to perceive the hiring process as fair, regardless of whether they were offered the position. The practice may have serious repercussions for the hiring organization’s reputation and make applicants more inclined to resort to litigation, says Will Stoughton, a doctoral student in industrial psychology and lead author of the paper. The study was published in the Journal of Business and Psychology. “There could be all kinds of negative consequences for creating a selection process that is perceived as invasive and unfair,” says Lori Foster Thompson, a psychology professor at N.C. State and one of the paper’s co-authors. “When you think about the fact that top talent usually has a lot of choices as to where they want to go to work, it begins to really matter.”

A couple of interesting studies examined the extent of discrimination against the unemployed. These studies are unusual in that they involved real efforts to find real jobs. One created 3,000 pretend candidates and sent their resumes to a random sample of job openings. They varied one item among otherwise identical applications: whether the individual was currently unemployed and, if so, how long they had been unemployed.

Only about 4.5% got callbacks, which suggests that the typical unemployed applicant has to apply to a little more than 20 jobs to just get a positive response from an employer indicating that they are still being considered for the job.

You’ve been there. You’re up late one night trolling job boards and in between travel ads the perfect job opportunity appears. You hear the heavenly hosts cheering you on and rush to update your resume.

But before you add your latest and greatest skills and accomplishments, your brain interrupts with the job seeker debate: Should your resume be one page or two?

Strategies used to reward and recognize employees’ efforts have become more sophisticated over the years. However, only recently have employers begun to move beyond traditional (usually financial) incentives and consider ways to make work truly rewarding. In addition, state-of-the-art social and affective neuroscience—using techniques such as fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging—has illuminated how the brain responds to various types of rewards.

THE problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions,...

Ioannis Nikolaou's insight:

Interesting... For instance, people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often."

Good article in The Economist on the advantages of HR Analytics. The author gives several examples of how data-analysis can provide new insights for HR (eg. on employee attitudes and behavior).

Realisticly, the article ends with the remark that although "algorithms and big data are powerful tools", "they must be designed and used by humans, so they can go horribly wrong." In other words, blindly relying on such instruments is not recommended.

Profits and promotions accrued through unethical practices at workplaces can shock us about how even nice people can indulge in malpractices for gains. Here, we take a look at things that make people indulge in such practices and what can be done about the same

This study integrates research from strategy, economics, and applied psychology to examine how organizations may leverage their human resources to enhance firm performance and competitive advantage. Staffing and training are key human resource management practices used to achieve firm performance through acquiring and developing human capital resources. However, little research has examined whether and why staffing and training influence firm-level financial performance (profit) growth under different environmental (economic) conditions. Using 359 firms with over 12 years of longitudinal firm-level profit data, we suggest that selective staffing and internal training directly and interactively influence firm profit growth through their effects on firm labor productivity, implying that staffing and training contribute to the generation of slack resources that help buffer and then recover from the effects of the Great Recession. Further, internal training that creates specific human capital resources is more beneficial for prerecession profitability, but staffing is more beneficial for postrecession recovery, apparently because staffing creates generic human capital resources that enable firm flexibility and adaptation. Thus, the theory and findings presented in this article have implications for the way staffing and training may be used strategically to weather economic uncertainty (recession effects). They also have important practical implications by demonstrating that firms that more effectively staff and train will outperform competitors throughout all pre- and postrecessionary periods, even after controlling for prior profitability.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether firms that use more rigorous staffing and training outperform firms that do not—before, during, and recovering from the Great Recession. You can guess the answer!

Experiments show that simple psychological preparations make a big difference

Ioannis Nikolaou's insight:

It is already well established that people who feel empowered pay more attention to rewarding information, express themselves more freely when interacting with others, and experience more positive emotion. They also tend to be more persuasive, less susceptible to the influence of others, and more confident. Power breeds optimism, higher self-esteem, and action in pursuit of goals. By contrast, those lacking in perceived power experience a reduced sense of control and diminished access to resources or rewards, which in turn may lead to pessimism, depression, a withdrawal from activity, and poor health.

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.

Ioannis Nikolaou's insight:

An interesting article on Empathy from the well-known author/journalist

That's a key finding from my ongoing research on great companies and effective leaders: no one can completely avoid troubles and potential pitfalls are everywhere, so the real skill is the resilience to climb out of the hole and bounce back.

Volatile times bring disruptions, interruptions, and setbacks, even for the most successful among us. Companies at the top of the heap still have times when they are blindsided by a competing product and must play catch-up. Sports teams that win regularly are often behind during the game. Writers can face dozens of rejections before finding a publisher that puts them on the map. Some successful politicians get caught with their pants down (so to speak) and still go on to lead, although such self-inflicted wounds are harder to heal.

Resilience is the ability to recover from fumbles or outright mistakes and bounce back. But flexibility alone is not enough. You have to learn from your errors. Those with resilience build on the cornerstones of confidence — accountability (taking responsibility and showing remorse), collaboration (supporting others in reaching a common goal), and initiative (focusing on positive steps and improvements). As outlined in my book Confidence, these factors underpin the resilience of people, teams, and organizations that can stumble but resume winning.

Ioannis, really good and useful insight. This perspective reminds me of the recent work by Taleb on Antifragility. A simple example would be perceptions of failure being destructive rather than constructive. Even in situations where failure is destructive, this is a catalyst for the construction of something else. The application of Taleb's concept in the world of business would mean that irrespective of financial conditions, the organisation continues to profit.

Survey after survey shows that employee engagement at work is at an all-time low. One way to help improve engagement at work is to foster friendships. We all know them: the good old fashioned friendships created when we chit-chat, hang-out, joke, and have fun with co-workers.

....

Research shows that workers are happier in their jobs when they have friendships with co-workers. Employees report that when they have friends at work, their job is more fun, enjoyable, worthwhile, and satisfying. Gallup found that close work friendships boost employee satisfaction by 50% and people with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to engage fully in their work.

Recent college graduates are lacking in professionalism in the workplace. College graduates laid back and falling victim to common mistakes of Gen Y.

Ioannis Nikolaou's insight:

Generation Y is accustomed to a much more lax atmosphere where sending text message-like emails from their smart phones is second nature. Recent grads are becoming more laid back, but their future workplace may not be.

The job market is as competitive as ever. As recent college graduates have looming school loans over their heads there is no better time to avoid the common mistakes of the rest of the Gen Y’ers vying for the same positions.

The 2012 “Professionalism in the Workplace Study” surveyed a national sample of HR professionals, upper class undergraduates, and managers or supervisors. The study helped to define professionalism and provide numbers to analyze the current state of professionalism in the American workforce.

It is important for recent graduates to take in to account the qualities most sought after by their next interviewer. From an HR standpoint, the most essential qualities of professionalism are listed below:

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